AOL Does a Bit of Online Shopping

At 12:01 a.m. this morning, Arianna Huffington announced that AOL had purchased the Huffington Post. AOL paid $315 million for the mighty aggregator. Arianna Huffington, the Greek goddess of S.E.O., “will take control of all of AOL’s editorial content as president and editor in chief of a newly created Huffington Post Media Group,” according to The New York Times. “The arrangement will give her oversight not only of AOL’s national, local and financial news operations, but also of the company’s other media enterprises like MapQuest and Moviefone.” Would it were that Huffington instate herself as the new voice of Moviefone! AOL’s new Huffingtonized homepage features a video, embedded above, entitled “You’ve Got ... Arianna Huffington.” It begins, “I’m Arianna Huffington, and you’ve got to stop thinking it’s O.K. to not get enough sleep.” Steep orders from a woman who announced the acquisition of her company at midnight on Super Bowl Sunday.

The Times reports that the Huffington Post acquisition is AOL’s “largest purchase since it was separated from Time Warner in 2009.” Recall back to 2000, when AOL purchased the entertainment company for $164 billion. The deal was a bust: just two years after the acquisition, as Vanity Fair reported in January 2004, “some $200 billion of shareholder value had vanished and a corporate civil war had broken out.” If this latest merger similarly sours, at least there’s a divorce vertical readymade for both sides to air their top 10 grievances and regrets.